Wikizine/EN2008-89

******************************************
 __    __ _ _    _     _            
/ / /\ \ (_) | _(_)___(_)_ __   ___ 
\ \/  \/ / | |/ / |_  / | '_ \ / _ \
 \  /\  /| |   <| |/ /| | | | |  __/
  \/  \/ |_|_|\_\_/___|_|_| |_|\___|
                                    .org 

Anno Domini MMVIII Week I  Number LXXXIX    

******************************************

An independent internal news bulletin 
for the members of the Wikimedia community

//////////////////////////////////////////

=== Technical news ===

[Page protection] - It is now possible to protect unborn articles and deleted pages, with the normal protection levels: only sysops or semi-protection. Also, auto-expire of the protection is available. To protect a non-existent page (as sysop), you only need to request the page and hit the "protect" button.

[Title blacklist] - A new extension is live on the wikis. The Title Blacklist extension allows wiki administrators to block the creation, movement and upload of pages whose title matches any among a list of regular expressions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titleblacklist
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Title_Blacklist

[Special:Userrights] - Bureaucrats now have access to the special page "Userrights". At this time this page is listed in the special pages overview, but not yet in the sysops section. Manually enter "Special:Userrights" in the location bar of your browser or in the search box of Wikipedia to request this page. In the current form this does not give extra rights to bureaucrats. The new special page only combines the functionality of "MakeSysop" and "Makebot".

=== Request for help ===

[Fundraising] - The Fundraising website's layout and usability have been enhanced. However, this also implies that new translations are required. 
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/en - The English version of the new donations page
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Cbrown1023/Donate - More information about the translation request

=== Policy ===

[Stewards] - A rewrite of the steward policy is in progress. Comments are welcome on the talk page. A vote is expected around the 15th.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Rewriting/Stewards_policy

=== Foundation ===

[Fundraiser] - Now at the very end of the fundraiser, a modest matching donation of $50,000 has been made by an anonymous donor. The current total balance is $ 1.43 million.

=== Community ===

[Image service] - A project on the English Wikipedia provides a really quick and easy way to add an image to a person's biography article in various language Wikipedias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BOTijo/Images_for_biographies

[Wikimania dates] - The dates for Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria have been changed after a request by a group of people. The conference now covers Thursday-Friday-Saturday, and is held 17 - 19 July 2008. This way, the conference will fall into a single week, so that people have to take less days off from their work to attend. 
http://www.wikimania.org - The Wikimania website

[Photo submission] - Many Wikipedia articles about a person don't feature a photograph yet. A new project on the English language Wikipedia has started to ask people whose articles have no pictures to submit one. A request for people to submit their images by email, together with usage permission, has been included on the contact page of the English Wikipedia 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us/Photo_submission

[Stewards] - The confirmation of the "old" stewards has been concluded. Four stewards did not make it, all due to inactivity: Ausir, Romihaitza, Snowdog and Suisui.

=== Media ===

[Video] - Sue Gardner and Erik Moeller gave a presentation at Stanford's Open Source Lab about Wikimedia and the Wikiversity project, and shot a video of it. 
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Stanford_Open_Source_Lab
http://blip.tv/file/551254

=== Stats ===

[Stats for all] - On the English language Wikipedia, an extensive statistical overview of all the Wikipedias is included. In this overview, you can see for example that the Volapuk Wikipedia (the 15th largest) has grown by a stunning 18634% in 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics

[WP numbers] - The Arabic Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles and the French Wikipedia has reached 600,000 articles. 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_News -- more on this subject

=== Other news ===

[Reminder] - Soon, it will be the most important holiday of the year: Wikipedia Day. On January 15, Wikipedia will be 8 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_day

=== Did you know ... ===

... you can add a extra link to the upper right menu?

By including the code below on your [[User:Your_Name/monobook.js]] page you get an extra link between "My talk" and "My preferences". You can define the page it points to, and the name of the link, yourself. It can be used, for example, to easily access a page where you collect links to pages or websites you find useful.

The code:

/*Personal links*/
addOnloadHook(function() {
addPortletLink('p-personal','/wiki/User:Your_Name/Link_Target','Link_Name','pt-links','Link title','!',
document.getElementById('pt-preferences'));
});

Note: change "Your_Name" to your account name; change "Link_Target" to the page you want to link to; change "Link_Name" to the link name that is to be shown.  The shortcut key for this link is alt-shift-!.

=== Quotes ===

"An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in.  A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves."  -- Bill Vaughan

"It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets." -- William Thomas

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art27040.asp -- More New Year quotes

//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 706
Unique Visitors website last week: 157
Editor(s): Walter, Effeietsanders
Corrector(s): Oliphaunt
Thanks to: Adrian M. H., pfctdayelise 
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org
Website: http://www.wikizine.org
//////////////////////////////////////////

Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, 
validity and especially but not limited to, 
correct grammar and spelling. 
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time)
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html  